APRIL 2008
- page 7 / 9

The Hurricane Electric network covers the US and major locations in Europe. Each location is IPv6 enabled and provides IPv6 transit services in both native and dual stack formats. As the network expands to include additional geographic locations, it will always expand as a fully capable IPv6 network.

There are various ways to compare Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 backbone to other IPv6 backbones. One of the most important metrics is the number of BGP adjacencies at the edge of the network. The greater the adjacency, then the backbone has higher connectivity with the rest of the Internet. In the IPv6 world, this is even more important than in the IPv4 world because disconnected pockets of connectivity can cause enormous disruption for end users. Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 backbone has the number-one count of BGP adjacencies.

Top Twenty IPv6 Backbones Number of BGP Peering Adjacencies Measured 4/6/2008 through 4/30/2008

220

# BGP Peering Adjacencies

200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

204

173

164

101

17

0

HURRICANE (AS6939)

TISCALI (AS3257)

NTT (AS2914)

TowardRX (AS30071)

Global Crossing (AS3549)

Sprint (AS6175)

LambdaNet (AS13237)

TATA/VSNL/Teleglobe (AS6453)

IIJ (AS2497)

OpenCarrier (AS41692)

Wide (AS2500)

Asia Netcom (AS18084)

Level-3 (AS3356)

Canble & Wireless (AS1273)

Internet-2 (AS11537)

Telia (AS1299)

GEANT (AS20965)

TDC (AS3292)

SwissCom (AS3303)

ODN Softbank (AS4725)

IPv6 Backbone Provider

Data collected from http://bgp.potaroo.net/v6/as6447/bgp-as-adj.txt For more information and additional statistics please visit http://he.net/

That last graph shows a pictorial view of the data from Geoff Huston’s website. The data is collected from live IPv6 Internet routers.

Native IPv6 is available to all Hurricane Electric colocation, transit customers, and root dedicated server customers

Native IPv6 is available on the same port as IPv4 at no additional charge.

You may request IPv6 address allocations by sending email to support@he.net .

If you operate a router, you may request a /48, otherwise request a /64 per port.

In the IPv6 world, as stated at the beginning of this document, there are 128 bits included in the IPv6 header. Addresses have four times to number of bits that an IPv4 header would have. This is where the 79 billion billion billion number comes from. Its 2128 divided by 232 and yet best practices, as stated in RFCs, shows that IPv6 address allocations are not the same as in IPv4. The allocation on an individual